A computational biologist's personal views on new technologies & publications on genomics & proteomics and their impact on drug discovery

Sunday, February 25, 2018

PromethION: Straining at the Starting Gate

Due to the usual time conflicts, I've only watched bits-and-pieces of the Winter Olympics from South Korea. Which is unfortunate, as I do enjoy observing many of these events as so many combine grace, power and finesse. In the various timed events, the competitors can be seen tightly wound, ready to spring out at the crack of the start. Increasingly, that is how Oxford Nanopore's PromethION looks: a superb performer ready to bolt away.PromethION has had a long road and naysayers such as myself have in the past suggested ONT made a huge mistake investing in it. Only a small number of outside labs have gotten the boxes -- my rough count is there may be as few as 5 6 installed (York, VIB in Belgium, KeyGene in Holland, Toronto and Brisbane Melbourne [& U Oxford]). But it is clear that the instrument is a thoroughbred capable of great things.

First, on the last day of AGBT Ken McGrath gave some overview of his experience with the machine. Unsurprisingly, the initial flowcells were erratic in performance. But McGrath has seen marked improvement over three shipments in both total yield and the consistency between flowcells.

But perhaps more so, McGrath's group in Brisbane, VIB and KeyGene have been posting better-and-better yields on Twitter, with the record changing weekly or almost daily. VIB hit 63 gigabases on February 15th using human DNA, McGrath in his talk on the 15th spoke of an ongoing run that looked like it would go north of there and KeyGene reported on the 20th hitting nearly 76 gigabases on a lettuce genome run -- only to be topped on the 21st by VIB with an 85 gigabase run!

In the meantime, Clive Brown is claiming that ONT is routinely hitting in excess of 150Gb per flowcell. ONT has always done better than field sites, so those numbers probably won't be seen for a while, but Brown's tweet did show a substantial boost from "active unblock", which apparently wasn't part of any of the field runs. This is a software scheme which detects pores that have become blocked and reverses voltage on them to clear the pore.

and the latest internal PromethION chips (blue). All over 150G - close to two 30X human WGS. (Note colour swap) pic.twitter.com/G8WIiIDRag

From a scientific standpoint, PromethION could be a real beast, enabling de novo long read assembly to become standard for both known genomes such as human and complex eukaryotes. McGrath gave a taste of the power for metagenomes: on a mock metagenome 1 minute of PromethION data was sufficient to enumerate the species composition of the mixture.

Even at the maximum price of $2K per flowcell and 50 gigabases output, PromethION would be delivering an awful lot of data for a reasonable price; at $625 a flowcell and 90 gigabases it is making long reads crazy cheap.

As Oxford ramps up, there will probably be speedbumps. I've now spoken to a number of GridION owners, and at least two of them received dud machines -- and in one case the replacement failed soon after arrival. But ONT has a big enough stock they can simply ship out new instruments. PromethION will presumably be on a similar model. Flow cell production scale-up could also be glitchy, but since Oxford has succeeded in delivering to Australia suggests they have really mastered worldwide delivery of their consumables.

Perhaps the prime thing that will prevent PromethION from completely taking over this year's London Calling agenda is that so few labs have one right now. But with more machines anticipated to arrive at some key labs in the next few months, who knows? Perhaps half a dozen or more of the plenary talks will detail experiences with PromethION -- and detail its use for genome assembly, metagenomics and more. And there doesn't seem to be any serious whale watching on PromethION -- imagine the number of monster reads that might be netted

Will PromethION push Illumina to respond on price? After all, it is reputed (particularly from Illumina investor presentations) that Big I has huge margins on reagents. But people I spoke with AGBT who aren't committed MinION users remain skeptical of ONT data Illumina is also projecting that their revenues from clinical-facing applications may surpass research applications this year. So if Illumina doesn't feel heat in the clinic, they may not feel any pressure to rein in pricing. Most likely, it could be a year or two before Oxford -- even if they execute perfectly -- can really start to peel substantial numbers of users away from the familiar reliability of Illumina.

PromethION presents an even tougher problem for Pacific Biosciences, given the leap in output per dollar the new box represents. PacBio retains a significant advantage in consensus error quality, but as I've noted before, many applications aren't very sensitive to this. Full length RNA sequencing is one example; if you have a good reference genome getting the mRNA sequences base perfect isn't critical. Again, ONT has a hill to climb in terms of community acceptance and perception of the data quality -- but now PacBio must fight a two-front war of arguing data quality over raw cost. Niches such as large-scale synthetic biology clone validation play well to PacBio right now, but those haven't proven to be large markets. And PacBio isn't deeply entrenched in the clinic, so they don't have clinical markets as a refuge. There's no doubt PacBio is a sharp organization filled with clever individuals, but they are now faced with a very difficult competitor.

All of this could get even messier for the competition in a hurry. Once Oxford is fully ramped on shipping PromethIONs -- or given that this is ONT, perhaps well before this -- expect a version of GridION that takes PromethION flowcells instead of MinION ones. Clive Brown has hinted at this, and it would certainly have a market. Ideally such a box would enable quick swapping from one mode to the other, but I suspect that instead such boxes will come either all MinION or all PromethION. Such a box, with a lower initial price point and taking less bench real estate, could appeal to smaller labs.

As always -- stay tuned! Luckily we don't have to wait four years for the next exciting developments in sequencing technology.

[2018-02-26 8:10 corrected Brisbane to Melbourne and added U Oxford, which I had missed]

9 comments:

svennd
said...

Active unblock was released on 15.02 for promethion, and I believe both for keygene and VIB/ua the active unblock updates where installed, so don't think we will see huge increases soon. Without active unblock we reached 63Gb (https://twitter.com/VIBTechWatch/status/962341050097467393) with it 85GB

They also where both ran on friday 16.02. However the public reporting happened a bit later since its difficult to accurately estimate the yield during run w/o live basecalling. (guppy should be a game changer soon)

Yawn. This product is still far from being able to compete with illumina or even Pacbio. A few beta sites that sequence 1/cell per week doesn't really impress me. ONT hasnt proven they can reliably scale a product. The GridIon was a complete failure. Does anyone know a lab that uses the GridIon at anywhere near capacity? Has any lab had repeat orders for the GridIon? Just take a look at some quotes from a recent research report about ONT "An employee of one of the three Chinese buyers Nanopore recently announcedconfirmed that the company had purchased three sequencers fromOxford Nanopore, but “We’re not very satisfied with the results. We definitelywill not buy more,” he said. “Their technology is not very mature….We spent all this money, but we achieved about 10% of the expected results.”He added, “We think about 80% of what company management saysis bull.”

"A genetics institute in Beijing conducted a detailed comparison of existingtechnologies for long sequencing. One of the researchers said thatNanopore’s reads are the longest but that the institute chose to buy PacBioequipment. A management employee of a key partner to Nanopore in aphone interview said [our translation], “The cost for Nanopore reads is veryhigh; basically it’s very hard to make commercial. Even though the machineisn’t that expensive, the materials are, because you need to do a lotof tests.” "

All I see here in ONT rushing out a product that works when you hand select your best flow cells to a few customers to ensure maximum hype. I guarantee the promethion won't be used for any large scale projects this year. ONT will have major growing pains. They're just rushing out data and making twitter claims of "cheapest" cost per base because they are in desperate need of a funding round.

"A 30x ONT genome will not be anywhere near the equivalent of a 30X Pacbio or Illumina genome."Why don't ONT just sequence the product of a CCS style substrate? It's not like it is a new concept, people did it with Sanger, so I don't see why not?

Anonymous: There is a protocol for this, using rolling circle amplification to generate a concatenated series generated from the same template. ONT can't do a circular read like PacBio, since the molecule must be threaded through the pore as a single strand and then can't return.

But that doesn't address the fundamental problem that at the level of signal different polynucleotide runs look the same -- so no matter how deeply you sequence the same template, there will be ambiguity/error

About Me

Dr. Robison spent 10 years at Millennium Pharmaceuticals working with various genomics & proteomics technologies & working on multiple teams attempting to apply these throughout the drug discovery process. He spent 2 years at Codon Devices working on a variety of protein & metabolic engineering projects as well as monitoring a high-throughput gene synthesis facility. After a brief bit of consulting, he rejoined the cancer drug discovery field at Infinity Pharmaceuticals in May 2009. In September 2011 he joined Warp Drive Bio, a startup applying genomics to natural product drug discovery. Other recurring characters in this blog are his loyal Shih Tzu Amanda and his teenaged son alias TNG (The Next Generation).
Dr. Robison can be reached via his Gmail account, keith.e.robison@gmail.com
You can also follow him on Twitter as @OmicsOmicsBlog.